In Triptic, the cracked cartographic dream city, my feet sink puddles in soft clay whenever stagnant for more than a moment, and even the interstices of one’s desiccated footprint act as raw, divine matter for constructing the great work; a Ptolemaic-Mercatorian Guild plots the divergent landscapes of the charted universe, molecule by molecule, operating under ancient alchemical initiatives.  For the Guild, any pattern captured by perception becomes data (Supposition One of the Projectorate, the local holy book), and thus, becomes an element in the actual composition of the maps—methane distribution from the anus of a dungbeetle, fingerprint patterns dusted from an autopsy scalpel, protein deposits from the local prefect’s urine, chunks of protruding brickends melted uneven on adobe temples, clouds passing through the mile-high mizzenmasts scattered and fragmented.

Where an apprentice, may, for instance (in her boundless enthusiasm), discover a congruence of gesture, say, in the phonemes uttered by a cell of disgruntled sadomasochists protesting the legality of consensual amputation (safety diminishes their pleasure factor), a Master Cartographer would simply laugh the laughs of a thousand chuckles, and pick lice from the world-dog’s furry mane.  The apprentice then rushes the data through the weave of committees and focus groups like a field mouse zigzagging through the fluted cornrows, without thinking—the Foundation Grant Council with its McCarthy-esque witch-hunts, the Chlorophyll Deliberative Body (nine members—three fauna, five flora, one hybrid), the dreaded GOMWSATBS(AB) (grumpy old men who sit at the barber shop [and bitch]), four kids who step on cracks at the same time, ad infinitum.  The signature push hastily conceived with drunken ruses, unmentionables currencies, sexual assaults—and our apprentice is quick, ever so quick, to spread out the sadomasochistic phonemes into a plan for a correlative residential development in Sumatra, complete with aqueducts, obnoxious mayoral candidates, and metered parking. 

Yet, the Master Cartographer will understand the phonemes in question as parcels of a much more intricate template, perhaps encapsulating not only the sound-pockets of concurrently flapping-tongues, but the actual structure of the air-currents formed by those tongues in the production of those phonemes, or, the variances of tongue and mouth formations in different vectors of wind-speed assigning those perpetual phonemes a more peripheral relevancy.  The true map turns out to signify some wholly different section of the planet—an industrial park just north of the Caspian Sea, the cerebral-cortex pattern for an inchoate artificial intelligence, a fresco of the setting sun on a billboard by I-95 . . . and the apprentice’s hasty plan takes flame at week’s end with the regular assortment of banned books and satanic psychobilly records.  As for Sumatra, the Master Cartographers joke in the bath halls, slap towels and proxy flesh, that the Third World can always use the extra aqueducts.

. . . Al-Ahazeff, the long-dead kulturist, creates the first Babylonian city-plan from the shape of a snail’s intestine, inadvertently crunched beneath his wooden peg-leg at history’s outset.  Coincidence never had a chance . . .

. . . Rolls of the I-Ching unfurl the Holy Roman Empire on a nightly basis.  The Great Schism is nothing more than the mountain below (Khyen) over the wind above (Procession) . 

. . . Abraxas Jones, that disagreeable, goiter-laden cancer patient, institutes the Kaballah craze with the accidental assembly of a four-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, one side the cracked edifice of the bombed-out Taj Majal post-ICBM attack, the second side a pastoral (but sleazy) still of the “Tabasco scene” from the 1973 Canadian porn-epic, The Great White Nookie.  Suffering from both reticular degeneration on his optico-electrical implant (the distinctiveness of lines and wires ever-fuzzier) and bouts of debilitating neuralgia in the testicles (protracting leftward ever-downier), Abraxas chances upon a solution of the puzzle in which all pieces fit perfectly together despite an obvious duality of image.  Cum-shots from Nookie blend with the Indian palace’s crumbling minarets in one fluid picture, and “Quabbalah!,” Abraxas exhorted (some say it was “Wallah!” with his toothless mouth grinning like a paper moon).  As one of the eldest (and more senile) Master Cartographers of the Guild, he sets to work post-haste in defining the cultural mores of the discipline direct—the “Great Work” of the Renaissance Magi, Ein Sof and the broken vessels (a fantastic Bar Mitzvah band), those ruddy Qlippoth, the serpent draped over the cross, a few Gnostic busybodies, coffin-less burials for many Hasidim, the calculus of Christ as endorsed by Johannes Reuchlin’s De Verbo Magnificum (1494), the breaking of the glass at the conclusion of the Jewish marriage toast; as well as the various locations engendered by the analysis and perception of these new patterns—Benjamin Bannicker’s entire D.C. layout, the coconut plantation of Seychelles (due E. of Zanzibar proper), a maculation in the shape of Franz Liszt on the left hindquarter of Mrs. O’Leary’s moocow, Texarkana (Texas), Tunis (Tunisia), and the dull, alphanumeric pitter of the Lindbergh baby’s first fricative zurbles. 

But the Cartographers’ roles have been perhaps unnecessarily and deceptively augmented, for even such Master Cartographers as Abraxas Jones or Al-Ahazeff perceive and transfigure only within their own idiom.  It’s true that their mediums are multifarious—the aforementioned jigsaw puzzles, I-Ching, and entrails, the lithograph, photoengraving, camera lucida prints, computer simulation, claymation stop-gap films, hologram projection, an occasional inter-dimensional portal, trash skulpture, finger-painting on particle board, slovenly, discombobulated tempera paintings, stellar alignment patterns, ice-carving blocks—in order to translate the patterns of perception into plans for creation. 

Once rendered, the Land-surveyors then take over (a rather base trade), breezing through Triptic’s alkaline streets in schools of trained autoplankton, hiding in their office mews jutting from mountainsides, hanging suspended in seedy, cabaret back rooms when lodging in Triptic.  They go uniformed and sly in their white bowler hats; their gypsy apprentices lug sextants and laser cords, giant Masonic compasses for stenciling in the undulating variables of the many approved, Guild plans for the vicissitudes of terra-incognita. 

And as I sink farther into the mud of the planet, all but forgotten in the rush of images, their instruments crawl in slow motion over my body, mystified by the sounds of my incomprehensible tongue.

 

Triptic, as one might expect, exists as but a small tourist city within the larger Alamüte-Megalopolis segment of the Virtual Pleasure DOME, a hamlet for the curious and out-of-the-way depository for the star-gawking minions as they ride blindside into the Mongol domain spreading out toward the unknown east.  Despite the Ptolemaic-Mercatorian Guild’s obsessive control over all inflow through the city’s infrastructure—the traveling zaddik, full of wonder at the local folklore, has the opportunity (for only thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents in credit, adjusted semi-annually) to try out an Apprentice Cartographer mantle under supervision of a specialized Guild field agent.

Eager to explore any avenue that might provide assistance in my mission as an Assassin to penetrate the exotic veil of the Orient and retrieve Kublai Khan’s DNA—and with the Telos-5200 camera gun, my weapon of necessity, more miss-than-hit these days, I set up an appointment at the earliest opportunity (a fortnight from now) with Guild field agent Pox Romana, a viscous blob no more than three-feet ovoid, hovering like a jelly daemon on a poster for Triptic’s Tertiary Panel, the theme park/interactive museum where such encounters are made palpable.

In the meantime, in between time, I lounge in the dark cavity of Triptic’s budget-rooming house, the thoroughly unspectacular Madame Ovary’s Rent-A-Spot.  The mistress of the establishment purportedly alters her persona between the role of a late-thirteenth-century Italian dowager, somehow spurned, crossed, betrayed, or slandered, by a patriarchal branch of the Genoese Medici, (or so she claims every other sentence at the morning meal) and a 1950s Eisenhower-era Pomeranian answering to the name of Rupert, whose left hind leg was maimed past the point of recovery by an unfortunate incident at an anti-Guild protest involving one of Abraxas Jones’s undead minions (a certain Zomboid the Ooger), who mistook Ovary’s satchel of pre-broiled swine ears as a homemade pipe-bomb marked for the crotchety Abraxas (attempts are made on his life almost daily); in defense, Zomboid began to beat the little dog senseless with a standard-issue Guild Billy club and a healthy dose of preternatural whoop-ass.

Time for a hot shower.

 

Steam, in my pores and through my hormones, cleansing out the dirty.  And now I’m lounging in the pharmacy, speaking with the proprietor/soda jerk/all-too-eager-script-writer Dr. Lex and it’s two weeks later.  He’s Madame Ovary’s estranged husband, a homosexual Jesuit, all seven-hundred-and-thirty-five pounds of him, mortar-and-pestling a few Bannisteria caapi addicts with dosed electrolyte milkshakes until the peyote buttons hit this end of the DOME in another few days.  Obviously, that’s the cycle here for things.  The tab is outrageous, and two of the Peyote Kids march sadly into the back, agreeing to be milked of their chromosomes in lieu of payment.  The two remaining slag-mongers slap on multi-colored company aprons (an angry dog bites a woman’s ovary as though it were a chew toy) and move languidly towards the dishes for a three-sink stint of pecuniary purgatory. 

Wash.  Rinse.  Sanitize.

“Thirty years old today isn’t all that old,” barks Lex as he licks dollops of codeine-hummus of the crust of a paper-plate.  He extends the plate lip toward me, and I refuse, thinking how clean I am in comparison to this place, this city.

“Depends on the point of comparison, I reckon,” says I.

            “Thirty dog years.  Puts my killer bitch of a wife at thirty times seven . . . let’s see . . . you any good at Algebra, killer?” 

            “Only calculus.  Derivatives are easiest for me, but you don’t even need an algebraic equation for that, my friend.”  I intimate the final cadence with the rough, proper patter of an Alamüte Assassin on initial contact.  Tough, but approachable, calm, yet slightly overbearing.  Never know exactly where an organism may stand in the Triptic. 

“True, maybe, but you got to watch out for the hidden variables.”

 

This senseless opacity goes on for several minutes, and I can’t be sure about Dr. Lex.  I possess little if any idea what we are speaking of, per se, opposed to our mutual contest to veil normal speech with layers of may-or-may-not-be-profundity.  I’m stuck here in Triptic for at least another day, until my meeting with Pox Romana and my hope of learning something tangible for my mission in this labyrinth of maps and mapmakers, patterns and projects.

So I suck down a few of Dr. Lex’s special frothies, and it takes me to four to forget the orange acidic taste of the sodium pentathol in the carbonated spume and ice-milk.

“So, I didn’t always do this you know. . . .”  Dr. Lex has got a gold-tooth.  I’ll be damned.

“Drugging the client’s drinks,” I chortle and feel my vorpal blade in its housing.

“Har, har.  That’s standard practice in these parts . . . makes for more barroom intimacy, and keeps secrets from getting too much legroom.”

What if the legs are maimed, I wonder, but think better of speaking. “‘Standard.'  Doesn’t that change here every minute?”  I ask about the Cartographers, since Lex is hyper-intent on letting me know his failed, veiled, past.

“Yes, I used to be a cartographer, no not a misspeak, small ‘c’ indeed.  It was back in the winter of ‘03 . . . what a bastard that was . . . not much snow in this environment theseadays, and there wasn’t much then either, but something about that winter . . . I mean you think winters get cold back in Alamüte proper, well, boy let me tell you something.”  Boy is inflected with genuine distaste, and Dr. Lex rolls up his knickers on a clear-glass ottoman to my immediate forward looking range—he’s pulling out the ethereal key to the hillbilly tool shed where the demon sacrifices have been taking place for years under Sheriff Idjit’s drunken nose  “It wasn’t very cold here either, but I was an apprentice cartographer, and that’s what made it hell.  I started the story off like it was a bad winter for everybody and I don’t want you to get the idea that that was just some dang hubris on my part.”  He refills my frosty mug and adds a splash of mango juice. “It wasn’t and isn’t and will never be . . . you see . . . my first patterns were as fucked up as everybody expected ‘em to be.  I had only been around a few hundred years, or so they told me, and they also told me I was particularly perceptive, more so than most of the others, so how could I be expected to know that what I thought was the ‘classic’ steam-on-glass-from-boiling-macaroni-water wasn’t really a tiny nodule of the windows-composed-of-seventy-three-percent-or-greater-Northern-Kashmiri-sand-bombarded-by-currents-of-steam-from-starch-products-in-general pattern?  Exactly, I couldn’t be . . . I tell you.  But that fucking prick, excuse my metaphors . . .”  He pulls me toward his mouth and my eyes slant over the counter at the barelegged fur of Dr. Lex’s figure.  “That prick Al-Ahazeff didn’t even see that it was really the old correlation-from-the-temperature-in-certain-gas-grills-installed-in-the-poorer-streets-of-Southhampton-homesteads-between-January-first-and the summer-solstice-when-boiling-starches-making-obvious-fractal-patterns-on-the-Kashmiri-glass.”

I perk up at the thought of the summer solstice, worried a bit, that time is dribbling away; I can hear the whispy Assassin mission instructions on the sonic imprint of my brain just as primitive cuneiform might stick to the interior of a stone balloon. The scribbles are permanent, but the specifics escape me. 

“So, while this obviously correlated with the Grand Duchy redistribution plan used to draw up Bismarck’s original unification of the German states in 1880, I couldn’t be expected to see a fallacy in the proposal, if Al-Ahazeff couldn’t even . . .”  Dr. Lex drops me back onto the stool and it feels like he’s been speaking for at least an hour of slow-molasses Triptic time.

“Thus, I’m not really to blame for WWII any more than Hindenberg himself, or that old lady in Peoria whose uncontrollable pustules shuffled themselves into the attack plan for Pearl Harbor.  If they hadn’t told me I was a prodigy, I wouldn’t have believed it myself and never would have had the support needed to get my neophyte reading pushed through the necessary bureaucracies.  Do you know what they told me?”  Lex pauses to unlock the pharmaceutical cabinet next to the frosty machine, dribbling excess goo accrued on his elbow from the pages of a soft-core-porn magazine hidden inside a comic book.  “They said, ‘couldn’t you tell kid, that even if the steam-and-glass-pattern held up in the circuit-courts, that the Saxon Duchies were impinging upon the eastward border of Hesse-Kassel and Bavaria by a more-than-acceptable margin of error?’  But of course they didn’t inform me of this in the regular apprentice meeting in the proper Guild vestments or protocols (which I respected so much at the time) but through an official-sounding-and-looking Ptolemaic-Mercatorian letter, asking me to meet with some bumbling lackey who then tried to extract damages for my honest mistake . . . following my instinct . . . and that whole, poisonous bit.”

Dr. Lex clears his throat, ahems and gurfs a chorus of fuming archangels rising into the overhead shafts of the pharmacy, before falling quickly, dejectedly, onto the heads of the Peyote Kid dishwashers and the open cedar-cabinet, housing medicaments and panaceas and physics and charlies and tranks and placebos and psilocybin farinas of all shapes in sizes, in decanter and vials, klepsydras and empty vessels.

“I still don’t believe them fully, about the patterns.”  I sip a secret swill from the canteen beneath my belt.  “Would you see about the solstice for me, check out the windows and such, when you’re, gurf, passing through, ahem, Changtu?”

I feel sick, redundant, and nod my head blithely.  Lex returns the nod like a junk-addled hyena with a throat infection, before starting a semi-vowel hit parade of throat-clearing hub-bubs; I’ve given something away.  Changtu . . . Xanadu, in Cathay, summer solstice . . . Kublai Khan!

 Lex yells a triumphant Sanskrit expletive at one of the Peyote Kids, reading the quiet between us in order to make out prescription labels on the drug vials, a little too closely, from across the room.  He’s so whacked out that he forgets to turn down the infrared spotter on his eyeball, like the one I have on my Telos-5200 scope, and even though the good doctor may be wizened to the antics of his bullied help, and able, through the same harsh sentences I thought were out of fashion here, to drink out pieces of me in patterns, he may still discover, in-Guild or out, why I am sworn to keep secret in the storehouse of my being.

“You just fell as well, kid,” he laughs sardonic, “for the oldest pattern of all, the get-em-hooked-with-a-long-ass-tale-of-other-patterns-incomprehensible-repeated-and-stuporific-while-impacted-with-drugged-liquids-until-even-theAssasin-has-to-give-up-the-goods.  The Guild will pay me a king’s ransom for info like this.”  And like that, Dr. Lex recedes.  Soon enough, the Peyote Boys take his place.

I lay beaten on the ground outside Madame Ovary’s, smaller and smaller, defeated soundly by this unholy grammar.  If this is friendly territory, I am worried about what lies ahead.  My head spins like the vagitated gears of a drunken kaleidoscope, and my eyelids droop like the shade of twilight coming down along the superhighway.  Triptic may be an annex, albeit it a distant one, of the Alamüte-Megalopolis, but I’m uncertain everywhere…an empty vessel . . . a king’s ransom . . . a three-legged bitch.   The Telos-5200 hungers down the lining of my metal-trousers, conforming to the bent posture of my leg and fastened down its length as a second skin.  It sticks into my groin on recharge like I always imagined hot pokers might feel if carried on the wings of flies that live in the fold of a man’s crotch.  As I droop in the setting sun, dreaming of the Big Dipper, the ovoid Pox Romana burns into my retina, a memory, recalled from glimpses of recalled posters.  Aries is ascendant now, and like Moses, I feel horns mistranslated on my head.

 

The dim, incommoded peacekeepers barter their way around the grafts and chasms that form the looped, meandering people-weave outside The Tertiary Panel maingates. I furtively pass over my platinum DebitCharge, issued by Alamütion-Fidelity-Security-Impropriety Trust, as the breath of the ticket-taker breaks apart into the sonic absence that fills the air around me.

Straightening my tie, which on the metallic Resemblati—the outfit of the Assassin—never becomes actually unstraight, I board the first transport barge, a paddleboat-looking-craft as it wends its way through the concentric canal system that splays out the rings of “The Tertiary Panel’s” ingenuous patterns of obscurity.  A cigar-smoking mother and her miscreant progeny sit hunched to my anterior, their arms dangling, laughing in the translucent water.

 

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH TO YOU FIRST TIME VISITORS TO THE TERTIARY PANEL, TRIPTIC’S LARGEST THEME PARK AND MUSEUM, THIS SPOKE OF THE CANAL THAT OUR BOAT GLIDES ACROSS UNSATURATED IS INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH THE MAIN SEWAGE TENTACLE OF THE PARK’S WATERWAYS INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH

 

The mother-child duo smiles blithely at the message of our intercom, as if language does not particularly concern them, as if they may not understand where they are.  Or rather, choose not to abide.  The barrel-shaped paddledroid, the apparent arbiter of protocol, rusty, moans like a hurdy-gurdy and stops dead at the rosined crank of its wheel by the seat of the mother-child. 

 

FIRST TIME VISITORS WILL ALSO BE FASCINATED BY THE FACT OF THE TERTIARY PANEL’S CONSTRUCTION BY ONE OF THE MOST WELL-KNOWN OF ALL MASTER CARTOGRAPHER’S—THE ODIOUS LEMMA—GLOSSED INTO EXISTENCE THE PARK NOT THE LEMMA THROUGH THE ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY OF A SERIES OF SMALL TULIPS THAT RESEMBLED IN THEIR CONTINUOUS SWAY BOTH A LINE OF TINY ASCETICS IN CONCERT WITH THE UNIVERSAL TAO BUT

 

The Mother-child alliance are sparked lightly by the rip of the robot’s stunglaze, and retract dumbly, their arms, from the running swill of liquid eating its way up their dirty fingers.

 

BUT ALSO IN THEIR ABSOLUTE PURITY BEFORE THE EYEBALLS OF THE ODIOUS LEMMA THE MODEL OF CONCENTRICITY UTILIZED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUCH PATTERNS AS AMSTERDAM THE DIVINE COMEDY AND THIS CYCLICAL ESTABLISHMENT

 

The frip of my trousers catches a spurge of brack up from the paddlewheel, but deflects, as per its construction, a mucous membrane between corporate and covert.  We approach the landing-station for the most interior islet of the whole place, smack centered amid the alternating rings of canal and waterway, land and liquid, displayed on fold-out glossy maps like a bull’s eye at the nadir of the universe.  I anticipate Pox Romana’s hands-on-demonstration (from the ubiquitous hype), localized, inhaling deeply, as the smoky pluze from the mother’s cigar constricts the barrels of my nose with the pungent texture of a fresh-cut lawn.  I toss her the look of the Assassin, something I seem to have inherited, genetically, upon acceptance of my mantle.  She responds with a gruff shake of shoulders, her child hoisted on rickety knee and disproportioned towards my vision in a equilateral triangle of line, shape, and figure, mutely inhaling, heaving lowly together, two tiny, imperceptible stones.

 

We pass off the transport barge rather hurriedly, the mother, child and I—motivated by the herding instinct of the robot’s tiny electroshocks on the other passengers, now, as we pass, like cattle, down the rolling ramp of unsteady polymer sheet, into the white pavement concourse of The Tertiary Panel’s middlemost quadrant.  The byway of this utilitarian theme park is somewhat different from the purely entertainment-oriented districts in the less sensitive, western lands within the Alamüte expanse I have already traversed.  Margins can barely hold back their blue balls in hopes of knowing the center, and The Tertiary Panel approximates the center, correlatively, of the Ptolemaic-Mercatorian Guild’s projection of the DOME entire—an equal-area conspectus of the world: size, shape, and figure set like vanguards at the vault of the embedded dawn, these patterns perceived, interpreted, charted and contoured, a model for what comes into being patent-pending.  The oceans of passengers across the aseptic divisions of pavement form the arrivistes of ivy and hybrid-old-world-fauna hemroiding up the perpendicular fissures, stretching into islets of ride-ravenous thrill-seekers and all-to-eager consumers of Triptic’s amorphous proto-continent.  The maps are potentially misshapen, and the debilities of the old projection-globes, flat and cockeyed, imply to me that the modernized methods may, in the final analysis, prove to be no less erroneous.

Thelonius Bosh—I—say it long and proud through the riff-raff, the attractions, the promise to destroy the Khan.  This is all a joke, of course, and my own voice cannot be trusted—from Al-Ahazeff to Dr. Lex and his supercharged tits.  Squeeze deep, young man.

Next time.

The standard attractions bloom, oh yes—the banana-skin colors of electrolyte vendor carts, glowing in soft neon diffuse beneath the sunlight, vacuous-looking maintenance engineers sprinkling cat-litter over upchuck, menses, and shredded clumps of body gelatin disgorged from semi-liquid tourists.  Huckster tapeloops hawk the one-way grifts: high-density ski-balls on low-gravity runways, genetic ring-toss over tiny, extinct amphibians, Ping-Pong balls in the barracuda plastic bays…And of course, the rides—the spherical innards of Whirligig!, the molecular cyclotron, spinning round and round in dizzy decomposition to temporarily miscegenate molecules in a grand multicultural farce (“Go in yerself, come out the Other!”), the tubular corridors of The Spankery with its on-site team of flagellating teenage employees, riled up on nembies and paid to sprain the rumps of the paying-customers for a few knocks off their over-indentured DebitCharges.  Past the over-queued Hall of Celebrity Gizzards and the subterranean entrance to Uncle Eyeball’s Partially-Condemned Sodium Mine.  The monolithic juts of the quadrant’s premiere roller coaster, the antigravity helixes of The Cell Buster, humping the cobalt horizon like a giant Y chromosome.

 I stand at the foot of the Colossus Inroads, the gargantuan hominid-shaped amphitheater and lighthouse where my ticket for Pox Romana’s show-of-shows boasts its wonders.  What force has mired me in Triptic for so many days?  I am nervous about my chance at cartography, a prostitute of expediency.  Thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents for a piece-of-the-moon rim-session and chance at perceiving a meaningful pattern.  Come get sucky-sucky, half-price blowjob satori.  You design the townred loverboy.  My insightful analysis of the public rituals here, my full cooperation in the spectacle for collective theater that allows the Assassin to blend like music through the reeds.  The Inroads Colossus sinks its leftermost heel one-half mile beneath the plateau of pavement marking the next canal ring’s bank.  Moving centrical, I stand just before the mainline to enter, at base of the left little toe, bigger, two-stories tall itself with hideous overgrown nail curled up like a jester’s bell-shoe.  The sight of it infests the waterways of my body.  Moving upward, my eye scopes out the lower midriff of the man-mountain complex, and then the dull lower-edge of the clouds, blocking out the heat rays, maintaining a curtain of the grey and the opaque to blur what little can be seen.  A ceiling of surds; I outstretch my hands before the flat of the Inroads big toe. 

Open sez me.

 

We whiz, whiz up the shafts of elevator, loosely based on the vena cava of the Colossus, and makes a bloodless circuit through the marrow of the theatre’s spine.  We head to the head.  We shoot past the bottom slots of the fibula and promenade souvenir level (travelogues for non-existent locales, Triptic jigsaw puzzles, fruitcakes, mugs, etc.), the femur-oriented mezzanine food-court (continental and fried, exotic and flame-broiled), the various observation-decks in each rib, looking out the glass-lined torso of the Colossus only to find the cryptic sightline hemorrhaged by broken smog both groundstruck and airborn.  

The Cerebral Ballroom is still occasionally put to use by Cartographer Emeritus Moses Maimonides, in order to deduce certain housing imperatives in the whole of Indochina and Cork County, Ireland.  Old showtunes blaze from the pipes of the Triptic-famous nostril organ, Scentimo, piping out “Oklahoma” then “Man of La Mancha” with a sweet windmill tribble that hooks directly into the skull. 

The cilia-lined sinus cavities carry the queue of chamber music and eager-to-meet-the-Pox ticket holders, myself included, up the folds of the Inroads interior face, over winding loops of spiral staircases and landings with impossible doorways—into the mini-theater of the Celestial Planetarium, four hundred and twenty stories above the canal’s interlocking heart.  Ushered to my seat by a pushy concession robot (I don’t want any popcorn, damn you!), its backrest all furry and dark, I settle into the stadium theatre set-up, my eyes scuttling all across the room. 

Stalls hang like permanent dental retainers on the back of the interior skull.  I’m no biologist, barely a humanist, but they appear to jut from the crimson-colored upper-rear of the occipital lobe all the way into the upper-front of the green-colored parietal section.  Psychosocial determinism?  I sit firmly at the cusp of the Inroads somatic sensory area, which regulates—the tiny viewscreen before me yelps—almost all homeostatic bodily processes: shitting (somewhat), breathing, burbling, mucous synthesis, mucous distribution, mucous retention, mucous expulsion, anal mucous sluicing, ad infinmucous.

Lights dim and viewscreen shines.  A smooth, non-offensive, Anglo-Irish voice informs me that all amphitheater seats are equipped with a “like” model, and that despite the simultaneity of broadcast, the displayed programming is actually a hybrid personal-information unit (PI) that merges and matches the vast databanks of the Colossus Inroads intelligence files with the individual genetic portrait of the ticket-holder: 

Bzzzzrrrrrp.

“Welcome to a joint production of the Colossus Inroads Amphitheater and Historical Re-Revision Commission (three-dimensional polyhedrons jump and bounce).  In association with the good people at The Tertiary Panel, Triptic’s only multiplex theme park and museum facility, located between the banks of the Odious Lemma’s resplendent interlocking canal system (overhead clips of the entire parkland, both canal and waterway), the city of Triptic’s Zoning and Gaming Commissions (special thanks to Commandant Opacity for his auspices), and the Alamüte-Megalopolis’s expansion programs eternally under construction, like all things, by the Master Cartographers of the Ptolemaic-Mercatorian Guild.”

(The screen blazes into the appearing-then-decomposing vestiges of famous Master Cartographers and a “simple-random-sample” of their associations: Abraxas Jones with arms wrapped around a cranky pseudo-messiah on a 1498 videotape, Al-Ahazeff and the dilapidated Coliseum during Roman Fever triage, someone-whose-name-I-don’t-know with billboards for the cult of Umma-Segnus, the World-Worm, spreading across an overhead of the Mongol dominions like Marxism would be, if delayed one century, and detailed on various World Wide Web mirror sites).

“Now, Seat number bosParietalch, Thelonius Bosh, Alamüte sponsored Assassin—the preceding images were culled in combination, as stated, with the Colossus Inroads programs banks as well as your own, inimitable presence.”  The word “inimitable” echoes over the brain-chamber of the Celestial Planetarium from thousands of other individualized monitors on each seatback.  The programs appear to be operating in response to individual warbles, exerting the illusion of Inroads interconnectedness through the occasional group chant.  I admit I am comforted, sitting plush and well entertained, but the effect of the “inimitable” chorus makes me feel somewhat-less-inimitable, and I springjump back into the surrounding atmosphere, back into the groping darkness of the group. 

I can hear the preternatural snip and catch the soft glow of a butane flash at a special balcony on the brain’s overhanging speech center.  In the muttled, motorized job of spark, I see the outline of dangled cigar from what I swear is that boy’s pursed, mildly bratty lip.  In the quick second of flashup, I can just cleanly make out his mother and his body . . . triangled as my eye moves . . . the loops of her hair on point with the celestial markers above . . . and downeyed at the spuds of his outstretched arms . . . eyes dilate and dips—all arranged in reference to myself before their own viewscreen.  The cigar-center of the cosmos becomes his orifice, both of them shaking slowly, held in the three-fold frimp of the lightplay.  Before the butane glow dims downward, the cigar moves like a red dot through the re-imposed darkness, geometric variables shunning value.

Back at my screen, head sworling in dizzy, dropsy . . . perspective fading, and point receding.  “As you can see, Mr. Bosh,” the vocals, picture screen, and images pick up the perceptive slack, “Unity is held together by artificial means.  Cut off the tobacco, nectar of opiates, or most powerfully, access to one’s bodily functions, and well . . . (Cut to miniature version of myself, slightly disproportional) . . . the picture becomes skewed.”

“Damn right.”  I hear a backward voice behind me, goaded by the messages it receives.  Emphasis mine.  “Who has the right to tell us what we can or can’t do with our own bodies?  Don’t you think?  Everybody?!  Don’t you think, everybody?”  A chorus of cheers rises, rises, rises.  “I mean.  We.  I mean.  We mean.  We bad.  We aren’t only drones, but entities unto ourselves, and if we want to drink, smoke, fuck, or in lieu of partners . . . hmmmphlll . . .  mmmphhhl . . .  mzzzllll . . .”

“Masturbate.”  I mutter softly, as he drops quickly below the plane of my sight.  “He was going to say ‘masturbate.’”  But now he won’t or can’t and someone sneezes and I lower my hand down below.  The screens glow and no one speaks anymore, no one dares to be anything other than quietly elliptical . . . 

“Mr. Bosh.  The sensory stimuli presented to you are not accidental.  And the arrangement of even this introductory sessions, the moments that precede Pox Romana are meant to speak with you in a tone reconciling the contradictory ways of concentration and interconnection that composes your weight and mass and makeup elsewheres.”

A dull metallic hum vibrates softly in the bosom of background, a dream thrum off the contours of the head I’m in, the carapace of Inroads, of crossroads.  My arms rise from the sixty-degree folds of my legs, drawn to the armguards aside my seat, magnetized into compliance, as shackles wrap around the wrists, the arms and feet in a cohesive hug with the bottommost seatdepths.

“You see . . .” and again the terms fly collective, ubiquitous, shuttering in the pinpoint stalls of the planetarium skull.  Tiny twilight twinkles, marking morning or dusk in the flypoint patterns, bring the Milky Way to life overabove, superlatively.  “A semi-initiated Master Cartographer, on his/her three-thousand seven-hundred and sixty-ninth year of advanced candidacy, rather advanced, has been personally assigned to your case, Thelonius Bosh, and has determined, through the technique of monitoring-this-broadcast-and-reading-the-patterns-of-image-on-this-display, the-crowd-interruptions-in-response-to-prepared-stiumuli-correlated-with-the-proportion-of-trace-elements-present-in-their-Triptic-avatars, the-proximity-of-those-whose-spoke-in-relation-to-your-person, and, in an innovational move, the semantic-and-syntactic-arrangement-of-terms-in-delineation-of-the-just-uttered-sentence-words, the, ahem, following personally-mapped-conclusions, rendered in full color for your personal growth and enlightenment. . . ”

The screen takes a shot from the SHADD-AI orbital satellite (I recognize the angle from Assassin training-docudramas), clicks in a few times towards the Mediterranean and European continents, passing over the requisite atmosphere pictures with soft, beady red glow, until reaching an overhead view of France and its surrounding outlines.  It snaps towards Paris, but then detours just off to Versailles. 

I breath in the floral patterns of long tulip rows, and gas excretes around me, smell the sky-sucking fountainburst, see the high French Classical placement of looking glasses, large and threatening, adorning the Hall of Mirrors like giant dimensional portals.  We sweep to Louis IV, embossed in a royal antechamber, Jacque Louis David’s Coronation of Josephine anachronistically covering an entire neo-classical wall…and then the Sun King himself—wigged, cruel, listening to an oral translation of the ancient Latin text, De Verbum Significatu, enthralled by the laws of manmade grammar.

“Thelonius Bosh, the conclusion must be that the Sun King,” the voiceover begins, my feet trapped and hands wrapped, an uncomfortable scrunch of trouser caught between skin, undergarment, and seat cushion, “that when Louis speaks the cryptic phrase ‘After me, the Flood . . . ’”  

The night is full of stars.

“He refers to the amounts of mucous housed within his own—both human and astral form, and that this ‘Flood,’ then stays lodged within the subconscious of France throughout the revolutionary period, inspiring Napoleon to later construct the aqueducts as a means to somehow drain the secret goo of his adopted country’s past.”

Boos rebound and ricochet or maybe it's oohs as the viewscreens disappear into squalid squares of darkness, closing in pinpricks of tiny, colored dots.  The lights above, in the artificial sky, twinkle and brighten with the ascension of a dovemoon fluttering quickly up from the horizon of the frontal lobe.  The shackles tighten and my attention moves to the Milky Way.

The will never be sufficient, a voice somewhere exclaims.

            So we watch the opening dissection without. 

 

“Here is our article reduction,” the voice tells me, “to unify.”  Can language cool down?  Seats rise and squirm on greasy tracks to linger above and around hospital flat.  Across gurney being wheeled, five or so, plus one or minus one (margin of error), medical professionals from depths in Inroads, several layers of subject to be dissected, so far undefined, lay silently, like etherized patients spread out across sky.  “They met at O’Hare Airport at six o’clock, but she did it for reasons of her own.  As for work done by assistants, able-bodied,” voice in mask on face of main doctor tells us, her coat bulges on flabby frame, “they will open with a scalpel. . .”  And then incision.  “Considering that slice . . .” or “Regarding that cut . . .” perhaps “Given the force under her blade control . . . ”  Voices bellow, doctor’s voices say about a doctor, main doctor under bright floodlights, many nips and tucks.  “Are you fond of animals?  It can function as adverbial.  Put that blade onto floor . . .”  Sounds of sawing, reducing, stultification.  We watch and wonder about the shackles, about prospects, until the arrival of ether and formaldehyde opens nostril and apprehension windows.  “Patient lives in hope and in Edinburgh.”  Rubber gloves snap.  “Sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”  Foot down.  “That is exactly what I said it for.” Minor doctors wheel patient away, gruff tension, flash and crackle of gurney wheels. 

“Next time,” crowd is addressed directly by doctor’s upturned, masked face, “we’ll do away with definite articles completely through cutting-edge medical techniques.”

 

            I have little if any idea of what might be going on.  But feel the thrush of claps and spasms as the hand and leg irons lift off my limbs, and the limbs around… 

Me . . . We . . .

            Clap together and alternately rub the soreness from our collective wrist between palmslaps.  Frankly speaking, I am frightened of castration.  Yes, of course, but also about shortness and rudeness. 

The stage is now bare, the stagelights dim.  The main doctor removes her cowl and exposes herself as an ovoid blob of gelatinous matter, fitting the exact description, even in my oversight distance, of Pox Romana.  The main doctor, the main attraction.  Dry ice and smoke rise and bubble from the orchestra pit . . . damn, an orchestra pit . . . wallowing over the lowest level of occipital seat like waves licking a wounded dog.  Again the thunder of distant applause, although it may be piped in at this point.

“Welcome, fiends, ruminants, courtesans, to the main-attraction-you-finally-made-it-whiz-bang-poppin-splurge-past-all-that-long-intro-stuff.  I am indeed Pox Romana, the grooviest, most splederific, emoticon and avatar of ‘The Tertiary Panel’s’ fantastic cross-disciplinary structure and five star hotel—Colossus Inroads.”

Applause.  Canned applause.  The stage retracts from the footfalls of the smoggiest onlookers and slowly inters itself near the interior brow of the Inroads face.  I unintentionally grip the upper-rim of the Telos-5200 with my shackled hand, and pick away the wedge in my otherwise-perfect Resemblati suit.

“Today, friends, we at the Ptolemaic-Mercatorian Guild would like to give a special welcome to the following entities:  King Al-Samsonite and his beautiful, ninety-seven percent female test-tube daughter—Princess Jauharah.”  Overhead spots illuminate a balcony near the back parietal.  The king waves and smiles around a sheath of bulletproof glass.  “And the Congenial Heart Disorder, visiting from another Inroads department for the employee swap program.”  Flash onto the heaving crust of fibrous, degenerative mass, occupying four entire rows, wearing a derby hat, and shrugging its shoulders with that happy, you’ll-get-used-to-me jostle.

“Thelonius ‘Pansy’ Bosh, the deadliest Alamüte Assassin ever to wrestle with the angel, baby . . .” 

            The spotlights cover me like shimmering knives, and I feel like the Bronzini statuettes cowering in the halls of St. Peters.  Again the clapping, and a chorus of oohs and aahs.  Not surprising given the reactions of most who recognize my vestments or come in contact with me.  “Lonny, as he prefers to be called, is on a top secret mission for the Megalopolis—one tough assignment for one tough customer.”  I cringe and feel my bowels shiver, stomach heaving beneath the metal cloth.  “But we can’t tell you what it is, wink wink.”  Release.  Pox Romana juts out a green-jell pseudopodia from the mass of her form, “Let’s just say it involves our ‘friends’ in the East’ and stopping their misguided plans for world domination.”  Screams fill my ears.

            “And finally, we’d like to welcome, Jawarthawal, the fetus collector from the sodium mines just outside Alamüte.”  The electric eyeballs pull back.  “Here on business or pleasure?”  Pox Romana hoots out towards Jawarthawal’s considerable entourage.  He hoists a fetus detector into the air with its flaming redlight. 

            “A little of both, Pox.  A little of both.”

 

            The platform stage below my stall continues to splurge out considerable quantities of grey smoky ooze, and although I can’t be sure, it seems as if the spectators who were closest to Pox Romana during the opening operation have been completely engulfed in the smoke.  Eaten, perhaps, and her platform rises continually higher, eeking its way closer to my own form grafted high along the back ridge of the intra-parietal suclus.  I’m sliding into the fissures of the Inroads brain, and if it weren’t for the stage’s forays up above the disappearing patrons, I would have no relation point.

For once, I’m thankful for cheap seats. 

            “Obviously, the Master Cartographers who design the design structures of Triptic from its genesis to their formulation are highly-trained, specialized professionals.  To secure an interview takes centuries.  You can imagine a delay for the second and third one.  The drug test itself takes millennia to analyze.  Applicants need to fill a ten-thousand CC canister with urine for even low-level approval.  In quadruplicate.  One guy started pissing at the dawn of time and was still pissing in the Mesozoic.  All for minimum, conditional acceptance into the ranks of the enlisted entities.  And what about the educational level?  A Ph.D. in one of the cartographic humanities—Mandrill Migration Studies, English Literature and Rhetoric, Secular Religions, General Buffoonery: Harry, Dick or Tomfoolery, Lowfat Yoga?  One effect, unfortunately, is that the application review board is flooded with liberal artists.  Open a window and the fuckers come sliding in from the drainage ducts, or the dog brings a few back impaled by his newspaper-sharpened canines.  Forget that newspaper though.  It’s impossible to get any privacy for the boudoir.  Don’t leave canvas around, because as soon as you turn your back they’ll start splashing color on without a dash of compositional integrity . . . or oftentimes, too oftentimes, the latest applicant records show, they boast about comprehensive knowledge of the symbolist literary canon.  The nerve!” 

            Pox spreads herself into the shape of a giant book, and a few of the apprentice “doctors” scurry back onto stage, trading their contamination masks and stethoscopes for bikinis and Speedos, slicing away the excess goo with putty knives.

            “Be sure to check out each and every word of Proust.  No cheating,” and the audience, including myself, burst into raucous laughter as Pox’s bookshape opens and flips itself through the requisite three-thousand pages.  The stage nears the center of the horizontal fissure of Sylvius section, jaundice-teal in color, ascending steadily towards the upper skull.

            “So you see, honored guests and not-so-honored guests, patterns are not something for everyone, even though we all are complicit in them.”  An animatronic burro trots out from the annals of stage left with a note, grizzled and dripping from his electronic tooth-fangs.  “I have just been informed . . . by a malignant Guild representative . . .”  Pox Romana asks the burro to cut a ridge across her frontal area with a fang for the nice people, and then calls in the pseudo-doctors, glistening from coconut-oil and artificial tans, to smooth out the approximation of smile with the shaping tools.  “The manner in which my assistants so helpfully jettisoned the extra protoplasm from my shapeshift, combined with the speed in which I flipped the pages of myself, which, I must tell you, seemed interminably long from my perspective, was a slightly different interim than you experienced during the flip of those pages, because number one, the aural cues are different.”

            The crowd gasps like they are being choked.

            “Settle down, not to worry.  It’s just an example.  The rate at which I flip, or hear-myself-a-flipping, which we will assign a variable in order to better illustrate, perhaps ‘dark night of the soul,’ differs from how you hear the flip for several key reasons.”

            The crowd coughs like they are being choked.

            “Your ‘dark night of the soul’ occurs at a different time interval depending upon your location within the Celestial Room of the Inroads.  Porque, if you are blessed with seats along the north face of the superior frontal lobe, the ‘night’ becomes inflected by the cavernous distance between, extending the variable to ‘dark night of the soul in December.’”

            The crowd guffaws like they are being choked.

            “Conversely, my little pretty ones,” the assistants run back onto the stillrising stage, shaping Pox Romana back into her base form, reattaching extra clumps of ectoplasm with troughs and putty knives. “Those right up front have a ‘dark night of the soul in the middle of June.’” 

            The crowd gesticulates wildly, like they are being choked.

“And of course, don’t think I would forget, those eaten up by the fog, devoured by the elevating engine of steam from the orchestra pit.”  Confused silence.  “I said . . . from the orchestra pit . . .”  A Stockhausen cello concerto plumes demurely in the background. “Those organisms are enduring, shall we say, a ‘dark night of the soul, eternal, doomed to pass away damnation in deepest Tartarus hatching the eggs of the hideous worm god’—just like those damned Tartars.”

Ambassadors from the cult of Umma-Segnus, the World-Worm, start whooping and craning their necks, hoisting up banners and tossing out tiny Ascaris specimens in broad arcs over the Island of Reil, the Limbic lobe, and the Hippocampal Convolution, chanting “Intestinal parasite of man.  Intestinal parasite of man,” and intermittently— “Go Pox.  It’s your birthday . . . whoop whoop whoop.”

            The crowd shivers as worms latch into their esophagi, like they are being choked—the crowd, not the parasites.

            “Props to you guys,” says Pox Romana, now level with the ambassadors, “and your funky parasites . . . so anyways, as I was saying. . ..” smoke spatters against some of the lower rows, the lower functions of the Inroads brain, the corpus fimbriatum and velum interpositum membranes.  “These distinctions don’t even take into account the Doppler effect, of course.  But even with one seemingly simple variable—sound—we find that each spot within the seats, in relation to my own position onstage, and don’t forget the acoustics of the Celestial Ballroom, contain a nearly incomprehensible number of values for the relative ‘dark night of the soul.’  These patterns of course, as I’m sure you now understand, allow us to calculate an approximate variable for each of you, and sample from your reaction accordingly.”

            A series of small explosions boom from stage left and right, casting columns of fire into the air like Tijuana New Year, singeing the top of the Inroads crystal head with black patterns of ash.  The crowd writhes in their seats; intestines symbiotically attach to parasitic lifeforms.

            “The opening dissection which you all watched, allowed us to do away, albeit temporarily, with definite articles, lending support to various medical prepositions.  Allowing for infiltration of your personalized worms.  As you can see even now, various everyday words have been combined together, in an effort to do away with the oftentimes-needless space between them.

            “These are the maps made from the disparity of sound.  We hear differently, allowing different pidgins, dialects, and cants to arise.  Welcome to the verbal revolution.”

            The Stockhausen dies; the platform rises, upsizes, moves toward my figure and form.  The crowd is relatively few in comparison with the numbers from the start of the show, many covered with the smog of Pox Romana’s stage, struggling to breathe.  “Spare that one,” Pox states and I swear she’s pointing at me, and no worms have landed in my vicinity.  I look upward for higher ground, but see that the cheap seat is paying off.  There are only two rows behind me now.  A twelve-year-old boy named Buddy, just to my rear of my occipital lobe, offers up a tab of primo Acid for five dollars. 

I tell the kid that freak power is a long time gone.

But still, the cockroaches, ones I hadn’t noticed before, cover my legs like a colony of angry, carnivorous ants.  Beneath the hinges of my plush, furry cushion, caramel sequins from the husk of a Hershey bar punish my trousers.  My Resemblati cannot be penetrated without my concessions, the conscious willpower dropoff, the mental divebomb—still, heaving the chest in an unrequited sigh, in the pattern of smother that says, however glumly, I, at least for this moment, and this moment is all that matters, give up.  I simply give up.

Pentecostal Pox, Romana clef extraordinaire, stares straight away at me.  I can feel it, now.                                                                                                                                        

“And every revolution must have its casualties, its martyrs, if you will.”  She morphs languidly into a Terror-era guillotine, crimson maple, shellacked with blood.  “I’ve taken the liberty of choosing a few St. Stephens from among the group.”  Three tiny animatronic pelicans, belligerent to the end these guys, plosh their peckers into the oily gel muslin of her body: giant viewscreens pan across streaming mass graves, sites of resistance fossilized in the Guild’s obsidian trenches.  “These are the others who sat with you in the Celestial Planetarium, this cerebellum of charade.”

I quiver a bit uncontrollably, I might say, but feel relatively confidant, despite the atrocity, that these victims of the smoke and ooze will find eventual vindication from the traveling war-crime tribunals that sweep through these parts every so infrequently.  I decide to lodge an official complaint with the local bureaucracy at my next convenience when Pox interrupts again.

“They-simply-heard-the-words-at-a-different-interval-and-on-their-frequency-decided-that-they-weren’t-going-to-work-any-longer-under-the-circumstances-of-this-oppressive-reality.  Er, sorry.  The rebellion is cellular, of course.”  The video fades on the dying embers of a half-carbonized cigar.  Crimps and furrows from a little boy’s hand jut irresolute from the airslits.   “Allow me to illustrate . . . reach the crescendo.”  Pox continues undaunted.  

“Take a peeksy around this Colossal theatre.  You will no doubt notice that most of your comrades, you fellow patrons of the curious, have disappeared.  In fact, we have killed them all.  The few of you left are indeed the stubborn ones, the somatic miscreants, whose bodies, for whatever habitually established reason, refuse to learn the cartographer trade.”  The stage that Pox Romana hovers above rises up into the outreaches, singularly floating higher than the stalls, tickling the chasm of the colossal longitudinal fissure with her gelatin shell like a week-old rim job tracing a chasm of cracked skin.

“Feel the sonemes, phonemes of sound, eroticating from the next prepared selection:  Allah’s anal abscess annihilates Buddha’s buttery ballsacks—cause Christ cancels cocks, dildos, death like a bad check.”

Laughter.

And then the Virtual Reality machines fall, fall like stars from the mile-wide smile of the Inroads ascending frontal convolution.  Fall like oxygen masks.  I grab the handlebars and strap on the gasmask oxygen-intakes.  Rose-colored glasses blotter my pupils, imperatively, absolutely—categorically denying my basic flesh functions.  I lean forward, shifting my weight like a pouch of syrup jiggling into the stirrups. 

“Once your VR gear is firmly affixed, we can really begin, again, one might say, perpetually, like the undead members of the Guild.”

So, I affix.

 

This is divination.

I am floating, lifted hydraulically from the ascending parietal convolution to the fissure of Rolando to the ascending frontal convolution, directly above Pox Romana’s hovering stagepit.  Whirling on the whirligig I know my position by the familiarity of my feet, long dactylic bone-hands cut loose from fiberoptic clay.  Hovering in Triptic . . . grounded in its virtual antipode.  Unexpected. 

One low price and I’m cruxing across a dirty meadow, marigolds blooming, the yellowed bulbs of parchment, swirling milkweed spores, goldenrod tsunamis whisking the shiny air—and this is virtual reality, and there she is—Pox Romana, imposing a brokered peace and lounging like a Delacroix model.

“I’ve decided you need some special attention Assassin.”  Repetitive echo from above.   Ultraviolet satori.  “Traveling is not always moving.  That crack about Christ and the cocks?  An arousal device.  See.”  She rips a page from her chest, still not fully reformed from the Proustian gambit.  “It says right here in your company profile: chronic masturbator.  Stop.  Thinks coincidences make sense.  Stop.  Feels emotional landscapes.   Stop.   High level of higher-level thinking skills underutilized below the metacognitive poverty limit.  Stop.”

“What mean you!”  I interject, exclaim, insert.  We huddle like lovers, undressed flesh pressing the base of a giant crystalline building, leaking upward at indivisible clouds.  Broken partitions of alabaster and clear-glass paneling sit four or five feet from the unrecognizable soil on upwards, before cloudcover dissolution, atmospheric denouement. 

A small sample and I rise, forever.

“It says right here. Lonny:  Recommend re-configuration at this time.  What exactly, Mr. Bosh, have you done to find the Great Khan since arriving in Triptic?”

“Can I dream two-ways here?”

“The Megalopolis keeps an eye out for things, for agents, especially the tendency towards slacking off.  How, exactly, will you extract the Khan’s DNA?” 

            The fold of Pox Romana’s belly, or where I suppose her belly to be, congeals into goosebump dimples with rheumatic grimples and casualties.  Crustaceous nodules of barnacle clay.  Pieces of Pox perambulate and the spikes pierce through her prime epidermal coating.  Conic monoliths and the anger, dotting her fallow sewage form like mighty oaks in a field of poppy, shredding the air surrounding.  “Surrender,” she farts from the ubiquitous fissures overtaking me.  

            “Precisely.”  I mumble and hallucinate, “Is this what the Master Cartographers see, when they . . . aaahhh!”  Pox Romana rams into my sides, raking the Resemblati outcrop with a shower of rips from the mace of her figure.  Oval with studs.  Cream-colored jelly mold.

            “Bosh.  Pay attention.”

            Blood pours out in tiny driblets from indistinct punctures in the mail of my metal-suit, my sacred Assassin’s robe.  My belly quivers.

            “Time for you instruction.  But first, my fantabulistic academical associate, the necessary leeching . . . a few simple blood tests . . . identity calibrations and that sort of thing.”   The medtech assistants wheel out the shiny, beeping DNA equipment, fastened with black rubber hoses onto the chassis of a rickety supermarket cart.  One carries a bundle of flailing arteries like a Caduceus, the external carotid, the Lingual artery, the inferior palatine coated with its own jelly—coiled tangle of serpents, and they go slaphappy on the grocery grating as the ergonomically-designed output apparatus pukes ticker-tape into the wind.

            “You’re a Hapsburg?  A Sax-Gothburg perhaps?  David Ben-Gurion’s blood descendant?”  Pox removes and reads the DNA quote.  “Splendid!  You are indeed one Thelonius Bosh—blue-blooded to the extreme.  Why you’re practically royalty, Assassin.”  The assistant passes me the huddle of arteries to towel off with. 

            “Let me explain to you, Thelonius, how this VR correlates with your own experience in decoding the DNA of the Mongol.  Consider that we are one level above the intersection of the Colossus Inroads with our physical selves…” 

            I raise my eyes to the veil of smog diffuse among the ether.  “Yes, It feels somehow different…”

            “We were in the cranium of the rather limited structure, about to collide I might add, and since I’d been there for ages anyhow . . .”  She undulates.  Strikes the ground with an extra lime-flavored vena cava one of the several assistants is sucking.  The sound produced is thwop.  “This is the plane of initial patterns.  Observe.”  Pox Romana hovers towards the base of the large, crystalline building and wipes away a cluster of white creamy cloud from the building’s commemorative plaque:                   

This site is consecrated as sacred to the scattered remnants of the Golden Horde, Ashkenazim Jewry, the Nestorian Christians, various tribes of Idolaters, several unmentionable tax-collectors, and an old pizza-maker from Vienna named Maffeo.  Let us never forget Pascal’s Wager:

Twenty sawbucks on the trifecta.

            “The pattern of this reality construction, obscured by cloud formations as it is, can be reduced, like stultified concoctions in copper saucepans, to a fundamental sentence word.”

  “A-ha.”  I say, suspecting all along.

“Pascal’s-Wager-as-a-capitalist-venture-appearing-as-breastplate-on-obscured-building-as-viewed-by-she-whose-cunt-is-like-a-piece-of-the-moon . . .”

I unfurl the Telos-5200 with taxi-driver reflex.  “Hey, bitch.”  The barrel digs into her scalp,  “I hope you didn’t just call me cunt.” The SHADD-AI orbital sends down microwaves like manna.  “I don’t like it when you efface my masculinity.”

“Touché, you little twit.  Put these on.”

Just as the VR glasses pulsed on my floating visage at the Celestial Planetarium, Pox applies a new set of facial coverings—a ski mask of finest damask, tiny bits of micro-circuitry visible like eyelashes reflecting from a convex pair of field binoculars.  The moss below fades away on the irradiated ground, and now we are changing, combining. 

 

Whirling once again as my body is pulled inward, entrails-exposé, Romana Pox and I, glutted and slammed in a queue for the pitchblacknight amusement park’s “Shroud-Spinner Cyclotron.”  The midway is flooded with dark wraps of fabric and shade, enfolding the apparatus of the Pitchman—black Moses of the midway, fuzzback megaphone and rage:  “Step right up to the ontological crack pipe, the blotter of the disbeliever, the means to an ends to an explanation.  We gots what you need right here, and for all you paying attention:  You-have-been-moved-from-a-object-postion-in-Triptic’s-Colossus-Inroads-to-a-subject-postion-correlated-individually-with-the-Ptolemaic-Mercatorian-Guild-agent’s-all-too-eager-availability-for-contour-explantion-events-where-each-statement-about-deviation-of-VR-quantities-from-Triptic-qualities-results-in-an-upward-move-from-the-previous-level-of-explanation-and-pattern . . .”

The Pitchman is blacked out in the tar-toned tintinnabulation of the “black humor” ice-cream man, shrouded in a Nehru jacket of pure, sallow obsidian, ringing a cracked handbell near its petrified handle like a newborn’s ankle crushed by giant, dactylic fingers.  Cries shriek out and resonate like sentence-words.  Ice-cream sandwiches and rocket-suckers explode in midnight-mass grenades from the frozen entrails of the goody cart.  Banana-shaped lungpops with caramel peppercorns disperse into the massaging hands of charbroiled fetuses—bumping against my ankles and knees with their trails of sludge and fallopian gristle.  The slurge of Pox Romana’s lower abdomen hovers over the tittered crowd with a dull, embryonic hum.  Motherly but cruel, detached.  Pox sucks down a segment of ashen milkshake, as I stare into the freezer for the things I crave most to consume:

Bony chips of ice-cream cake with cryptic Sanskrit-icing messages fold and conflate before the chill, black midway.  Human snow charring over the quad like Auschwitz rinderpest.  Mucous membranes decompose and the scabby wart of skin lesions tumble like drunk bison from the crook of my nose, frozen into the morass of deeper freezer creeper. . . . we flash full forward into the line, the fetuses instigating fights with each other…Pitchman egging them on with pro-choice dogma: “Just as your parental units succumbed to the pressures of the modern day and aborted you, perfectly within their rights I might add, you also have the right to be pissed off.  Every right.”  The fetuses jump into huddles and exfoliate minerals and malformed bones and some are trampled into primeval ooze while the weaker afterbirth colonies (they naturally attract one another) loosen the dirt below my feet and Pox Romana’s ovoid hove— merging little castoffs into the wet-snow below.

“Thus,” Pox yells, “I am not responsible for your failures, Lonny.”

“I never claimed that you were,” I say and we are pushed into the cyclotron’s otherworldly entryway. 

 

WARNING THIS RIDE IS NOT FOR THOSE WITH THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS—LOWER BACK AND NECK INJURY DETACHED RETINAS CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL TRAUMA MOOD-ALTERATION DEPENDENCIES NOSE-PICKING HABITS CANDY-CIGARETTE ADDICTIONS AGNOSTIC ENNUI PREGNANCY

 

Whir-whirs whir and away we go round the merry-go-dark.  Upon terminal velocity, I spit once and a tear of magma-smudge splashes Pox Romana’s gelatinous tincture of torso.  “Bosh, you shouldn’t be on here…you did see Jawarthawal?  Have you figured it out yet . . . worked it out?”

Clickety-clackety go the tracks of the spinning machine.  Rickety carnival.  Excess nuts-and-bolts pile to the side of things.

“We-enter-the-hallucinogenic-labia-by-choice-activating-various-portions-of-our-larynxes-such-as-the-cuneiform-cartilages-which-give-rise-to-small-whitish-elevations-on-the-inner-surface-of-the-mucous-membrane-as-a-method-of-deprogramming-the-body’s-habitual-memory,” I say.

Pox is pressed like a mercury sandstone to the face of Jupiter.  “VVVV . . . errrrrryyy,” the cyclotron whirs and whirs and whirs. “. . . goooood . . . cuuunnnntiiiiinnnuuueeeee . . .”

“I-speak-unecumbered-because-of-my-station-that-five-year-plans-are-hard-to-sit-through-and-even-harder-to-enforce-but-accidentally-occur-all-the-time-starting-in-the-hallucinegenic-labia-whirring-cylotron-flattens-with-accleration-and-checking-for-dingleberries-every-time-you-soap-up-your-asshole-day-after-day-after-day-or-always-checking-to-see-if-the-car-doors-are-locked-every-day-after-day-after-day-or-something-like-that?”

“P-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-a-r-t-i-a-l-l-y,” says P-o-x, and the passengers of the hallucinogenic labia crust uncontrollably like lemmings into the center-slit whorl, the spinning shake of blackout.  Pitchman plays cut-delayed tapes of his voice for appropriate safety instructions:  “Please-wait-until-this-reality-thing-comes-to-a-complete-stop-before-venturing-up-the-next-level-and-for-Baal’s-sake-keep-yer-ovoid-pieces-of-false-appendages-inside-I-can’t-stress-this-enough-people-INSIDE-the-hallucinogenic-labia . . .”

Brown-and-black fetuses detach like paratroopers experiencing chute misfire and tumble at the eye of the fissure.  Most never make it, bouncing off the cyclotron’s lightspeed ridges and disintegrating on impact with spin.  I don’t have a chute either, or does Romana, but we plummet, unnerved, saved by better guidance systems and the memories of our emaciated flesh.

 

“First-we-are-talking . . .”  I begin discreetly “Then-we-are-talking-about-talking, then, briefly, we whir-and-are-talking-about-talking-about-talking and now we-are-talking-about-talking-about-talking-about-talking?”

“If-that-clears-it-up-for-you.”  Pox pours me another cup of mushroom tea, waves her assistants away. “Personally-I-recognize-talking-as-a-collection-of-letters-ostensibly-t-a-l-k-i-n-g-but-the repeated-use-when-talking-about-them-renders-words-opaque-and-strange-ironic-in-this-case-since-that-is-what-we-are-talking-about…”

Hot-buttered scones and sugary cross-buns droop over the table-top, sticks atop loam.  Appetite is rarefied.  “Talking-four-dimensional-we-might-say-for-short-and-I-think-I’m-getting-the-structure-down-now-when-searching-for-dingleberries-or-double-checking-car-doors-which-are-both-activities-of-normal-frequency-the-body-becomes-trained-and-the-conscious-mind-becomes-free-to-cogitate-other-things-leaving-the-actual-remebrance-of-checking-to-the-now-programmed-body-like-headless-frogs-jumping-even-after-death . . .”

“If-you-simply-must-impose-the-mind/body-dichotomy-I-suppose-that-will-suffice.”  One of the assistants strips old telephone wires in a distant pavilion, while another unravels long strands of No. two pencil gibber from the sculptured sides of the graphite tip.  He inserts a few dull specimens into his anus and sharpens with a drill-like whir.  “You have to get what is already covered.”  Tiny lichen dance on beads of green pus, reflected in the delicate gleam of Romana’s body.

“OK-then-the-next-investigative-element-comes-from-the-fact-that-insertion-of-fingers-into-anus-at-daily-intervals-in-the-pursuit-no-matter-how-noble-of-dried-stringy-hairs-with-lumps-of-shit-balled-at-the-top-might-be-too-much-when-revaluated-over-time-by-a-consciousness-free-to-not-just-check-for-loose-fecal-remants-but-able-to-think-about-the-act-of-checking-as-an-urge-of-the-body-or-the-feeling-that-arises-after-climbing-three-flights-of-stairs-in-a-haste-to-feed-the-cat-but-then-running-back-down-to-check-the-car-doors-even-though-you-know-they-are-locked-already-which-might-be-a-shameful-and-unecessary-act-by-the-conscious-mind-but-somehow-a-guilty-lapse-if-not-undertaken-to-appease-the-body.”

“Precisely-the-body-is-trained-so-well-that-?”

“I’m-not-sure.”  Sip a strawberry margarita while the assistants play croquet with stuffed flamingos.

“OK-then-let’s-take-it-up-another-level.”

 

We-sluice-through-the-grates-of-the-English-garden-in-the-middle-of-high-tea-even-and-with-hot-buttered-scones-left-untouched-by-us-that-Pox-saves-for-the-assistants-who-she-says-are-always-hungry-as-soon-as-someone-mentions-eating-or-makes-mention-of-the-way-eating-is-often-mentioned-and-down-we-go-into-the-center-of-Triptic-in-the-DOME-only-DOME-seems-like-a-foreign-concept-or-a-silly-nonsense-acronym-for-something-like-Doormouse-Moonmouse-Earmouse-or-DOes-Man-Eat?-and-we-laugh-and-say-maybe-but-no-one-seems-to-be-hungry-today-in-Tripic-Virtual-Reality-but-maybe-it-is-something-very-serious-and-appropriate-to-the-overall-theme-such-as-DiOxy-Mononucleaic-Environ-or-perhaps-it-is-just-the-first-oh!-I’m-going-to-interrupt-myself-now-because-I-feel-the-difference-in-levels-here . . .

“I-have-it”-I-say-“This-really-isn’t-about-the-hypotheticals-of-dingleberry-checking-or-car-door-locking-even-though-these-are-two-valid-habits-that-bodies-can-internalize-and-for-entities-who-wish-to-stop-but-find-that-they-can’t-deprogram-themselves-this-is-a-serious-problem-…”

“Y-e-s-”-says-Pox-and-says-she-likes-when-I-begin-to-talk-about-the-point-of-talking-about-the-point-of-talking-about-the-point-of-talking-and-then-she-asks-me-to-continue-

“The-Tertiary-Panel-is-but-one-in-the-series-of-cracked-catrographic-cites-that-I-have-visited-in-my-role-as-Assasin-the-most-recent-begin-Triptic-where-I-have-journeyed-(in-reverse)-from-an-approximate-location-of-the-present-to-an-English-garden-at-tea-time-to-the-black-midway-where-I-rode-the-hallucinogenic-labia-like-it-were-my-homeland-to-a-meadow-where-things-are-flat-and-even-and-beautiful-except-for-the-base-of-an-oddly-familiar-crystal-building-then-back-into-the head-of-the-Colossus-Inroads-to-various-sites-in-Triptic-where-I-have-lingered-in-harsh-sentences-since-that-first-time-in-the-first-womb-city-of-Alamüte-Megalopolis-by-the-sodium-hills-that-start-this-place-on-a-quest-to-kill-the-Khan.

“W-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d-t-o-y-o-u-t-h-e-r-e-?” Pox-asks-me.

“There-I-recieved-my-mission-to-find-the-Great-Khan-Kublai-and-somehow-snatch-his-genetic-structure-or-discover-his-genetic-code-or-elminate-him-through-usurping-his-DNA-.”

“I-s-t-h-i-s-t-o-b-e-t-a-k-e-n-l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y?”

I-thought-back-to-Alamüte-and-the-things-he-told-me-between-puffs-of-his-joint-in-explanation-of-my-mission. “Now-I-see-now-that-I-have-been-a-vic-tim-to-met-a-phor-and-that-my-goal-to-re-turn-to-Par-ad-ise-is-based-so-lely-u-pon-mem-or-ies-that-I-can-no-long-er-trust-as-they-were-im-plan-ted-by-the-DOME-pro-gram-mers-into-my-brain-like-my-brain-pro-grams-my-body-in-the-course-of-ha-bit-and-that-any-dis-so-nance-from-the-pro-gram-ming-cre-ates-doubt-a-bout-which-path-to-fol-low-”

“-T-h-u-s-?-”

“D-N-A-re-trie-val-may-be-no-thing-more-than-a-met-a-phor-for-the-ge-ne-tic-sub-plots-op-er-at-ing-through-out-our-life-as-we-deal-with-the-un-cer-tain-fu-ture-of-our-race”

“-H-o-w-d-o-e-s-y-o-u-r-v-o-i-c-e-b-e-g-i-n-t-o-s-p-e-a-k-f-o-r-m-a-n-y-w-h-e-n-y-o-u-a-r-e-o-n-l-y-o-n-e-c-h-a-r-a-c-t-e-r-?-”

“That-is-the-first-lie-that-I-am-one-for-to-be-sim-ply-a-ware-may-be-pos-sib-le-for-one-and-e-ven-self-a-ware-ness-may-be-a-po-ten-ti-al-ity-for-one-a-hy-poth-e-sis . . .”

“-G-o-o-n- ”

“But-no-one-no-one-no-one-I-say-can-be-a-ware-that-they-are-a-ware-of-their-aware-ness-alone-or-they-might-just-as-well-be-mad-or-worse-be-in-a-va-cuum-where-as-a-par-ti-cle-they-try-and-oc-cu-py-a-space-very-hard-and-it-is-so-hard-to-be-a-par-ti-cle-and-oc-cu-py-space-let-a-lone-in-a-vac-uum-that-when-ever-they-as-sume-a-new-space-to-which-bet-ter-ob-serve-and-re-flect-u-pon-their-pre-vious-po-si-tion-they-can-not-a-lone-be-cer-tain-that-they-are-e-ven-in-a-dif-fer-ent-and-new-space-and-not-the-same-old-one-a-gain-and-a-gain-and-a-gain- . . .”

“-W-e-a-r-e-d-i-s-i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-i-n-g-?”

 

Pox-stretch-es-wild-ly.

 

W-e-a-r-e-I-d-e-c-i-d-e-.

 

-“-”-says-Pox-.-

 

I-t-t-a-k-e-s-o-t-h-e-r-s-I-s-a-y-.

 

“N-o-w-A-s-s-a-s-s-i-n- ” we-start-to-fall-to-the-ground- “y-o-u-

-a-r-e-f-i-n-

a-l-l-y-

-t-h-i-n-k-

-i-n-g-

-f-o-r-

-t-

                                               

-w-

                                                            -o-